Fifty years after Bruce Lee’s death, this Bay Area man keeps his promise

SAN FRANCISCO — Jeff Chinn says Bruce Lee saved his life.

Now, 50 years after Lee’s death, Chinn works to keep Lee alive in the minds of visitors at a San Francisco museum.

“Many times I get burned out and I get tired, but I keep reminding myself that Bruce Lee helped me so I have to keep up my part of the bargain,” Chinn said this week. “It’s just kind of strange because half my tour group doesn’t know he was born here.”

Lee died on July 20, 1973, after an allergic reaction to headache medication. He was 32 and not yet the martial arts movie superstar he would become.

Chinn, 62, is a retired mail carrier who serves as a docent in the Museum of the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he guides tourists through an exhibit dedicated to Lee’s life.

“His tour is really quite personal, quite in depth, and very intentional,” said the museum’s collections manager, Palma You.

About 60% of the displayed artifacts, including the blue suit Lee wore in the opening scene of “Enter the Dragon,” the 1973 movie that grossed the modern-day equivalent of $2 billion worldwide and cemented Lee’s place as a martial arts icon, were loaned to the museum by Chinn himself. The rest of the collection came from Lee’s daughter, Shannon, and another private collector.

Chinn was born in the same Chinatown hospital on Jackson Street that Lee was born in in 1940. They didn’t know each other, but as a Chinese-American growing up in San Francisco, Chinn searched for role models that would help him shed the perception that Asian men were weak.

With few star figures in Hollywood to look up to, Chinn found himself struggling to break the stereotype. He remembers feeling discarded in school, particularly in gym class, where he felt Asian kids were often picked last for sports teams.

That is until the Monday after the weekend of the premiere of Lee’s movie, “Fist of Fury” in 1972.

Chinn saw the movie on a Saturday, returned to school the next Monday and found the white kids saw him differently. The two captains of the kickball team had typically picked Asian kids last, but after they saw Lee kick a man through a wall on the big screen, they approached Chinn and whispered in his ear.

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“Then they asked me, ‘Can you Chinese actually do that?’” Chinn said. “I nodded my head yes. That meant so much to me, being relatively invisible on Friday to being relatively popular on Monday, like overnight.”

But the next year, Chinn’s family moved and he ended up at a school where he was the only Chinese-American.

The bullies wasted no time making him their primary target. After school one day when Chinn couldn’t stop himself from crying alone in his bedroom, he looked up at his Bruce Lee poster and felt a transfer of power.

“It was almost like Bruce Lee was speaking to me, saying, ‘It’s OK Jeff, because I am Chinese and I want you to be proud of your heritage,’” Chinn said. “And I told Bruce Lee, via the poster, I said this is the darkest period of my young life and I’ll really need your help. If you help me, I’ll pay you back one day.

“That’s why I lend my stuff to museums, to share his legacy, to keep his memory alive.”

In 1993, after Lee’s son, Brandon, was killed on a movie set in an accident involving a prop gun, the family held an auction to sell Brandon’s half of Lee’s belongings.

Four suits Lee had worn in movies were to be auctioned. Chinn remembers three of them going to Planet Hollywood. He won the fourth, the blue suit from “Enter the Dragon” for $7,000.

It’s unclear how much the suit is worth today, but another of Lee’s suits, the yellow jumpsuit he wore in his final movie, “Game of Death,” sold at auction for $100,000 in 2013.

Chinn has regularly loaned the blue suit to various museums over the years. He said Warner Brothers borrowed the suit in 1997 and insured it for $130,000. He also has loaned it to the Smithsonian, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and another museum in Hong Kong.

“I wore it twice and it fit me pretty good,” he said.

Now it is part of the Bruce Lee exhibit that began last year at CHSA. The plan is to keep the exhibit going for five years, refreshing the display every year.

“It’s been doing well,” said You, the collection manager. “People are very interested and the demographic coming in has changed somewhat. It’s more diverse now.”

Lee once had a martial arts school in Oakland. Today it’s a car dealership that has a handful of Lee posters on display in the showroom.

It was at the Sun Sing Theatre in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1964 that the trajectory of Lee’s life changed. He had issued an open challenge to fight anyone and Wong Jackman, a well-regarded fighter in Chinatown, accepted the challenge.

It’s here that the story gets murky.

According to the book, “The Life and Tragic Death of Bruce Lee,” written by his wife, Lee is said to have beaten Jackman in three minutes. But Michael Dorgan, an author who once trained under Jackman, said Jackman had a different account, claiming the fight took 20-25 minutes before it ended in a draw.

“It was much more flamboyant and cinematic,” said Dorgan, a former reporter for the Mercury News. “It was a pivotal event for him.”

With his quick-moving, free-flowing, butt-kicking style, Lee earned a leading role in the TV Show, “Green Hornet.” Bouncing between Hong Kong and Hollywood, he went on to star in several successful movies, including “Enter the Dragon,” which premiered six days after his death.

Chinn leads tours every Wednesday and Saturday, but today will be a special engagement for him and the museum, which is offering free admission.

“People my age who are big Bruce Lee fans all remember where they were and how they heard it when Bruce Lee died,” Chinn said. “It’s something people don’t forget.”

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED: The Chinese Historical Society of America is located at 965 Clay Street in San Francisco. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free on Thursday, July 20, to mark the 50th anniversary of Bruce Lee’s death.